


Of Monsters and Men

by charcoane



Series: Of Monsters and Men [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:01:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26665588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoane/pseuds/charcoane
Summary: When they’d met, Tony and Steve had snarled and circled each other like predators would their prey, callous and bloodthirsty, making good on all clichéd myths that had been perpetuated about werewolves and vampires. That’s that, Tony had thought: if Barton fidgets warily whenever Tony’s in close proximity, if Tony’s cold touch — no matter how loving and warm he means it to be — makes Pepper’s skin crawl, then there’s no hope for Tony and the creature that history says is naturally predisposed to loathe and shun him.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Of Monsters and Men [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2066934
Comments: 21
Kudos: 296





	Of Monsters and Men

**Author's Note:**

> Some background information: While I blame the existence of this fanfic entirely on _Dracula (2020)_ on Netflix, many of the elements in the story correspond to Anne Rice's vampire lore. For example, her vampires have developed the habit of dealing with their immortality by going to ground — mostly when they're having a tough or dull time — meaning they'll dig a pit in the earth and sleep for however long they want, which can take up to a handful of years or, if they're thoroughly sick of everything, centuries (hashtag relatable). They also have telepathic abilities and can among other things see what others see, hear what others hear, so they'll live vicariously through other people while they're resting in the earth.

It must have been years and years by now, but Tony still fondly remembers the last time he’d felt of use: poised in front of the mirror in a pressed and untarnished three piece suit, smearing warm-toned concealer all over his face — into the lines around his mouth, across the prominent bones of his cheeks. Rubbing cologne into the hollows his neck, over the insides of his wrists, and blotting his red mouth first with balm, then with powder.

He’d practice his smiles in front of the mirror — smile too hard, and people would jerk back, widen their eyes, realize that Tony’s sustained by something other than his heart pumping blood into his lungs, by his brain pouring information forth into his muscles. They’d see Tony’s top lip peel back, revealing those gleaming little daggers in the outskirts of his mouth. And, as Rhodey had told him time and time again, “Your face doesn’t look like a human face, man. It’s all grooves and dark shadows, and if your features are too animated, people are gonna notice that your skin’s too unnaturally hard, and your eyes do that weird thing where they turn even more, uh—”

“Dazzling?” Tony had offered.

“Pepper wasn’t exactly dazzled when she woke up to you staring at her and shrieked in mindless terror,” Rhodey had reminded him, and then leaned in, pressed a rough, clumsily apologetic kiss to Tony’s cheek when he realized his moderately mean but good-natured quip hadn’t quite landed the way he’d meant it to.

Tony remembers he’d been ambushed twice that week — once by a remarkably brave and grief-stricken woman who’d shoved her dead son’s picture into Tony’s immovable chest, the second time by the newly appointed Secretary of State. Ross, to his credit, had remained unperturbed and soft-spoken even in the face of Tony’s unrestrained scowl, his ill-mannered and underhanded remark that he hadn’t fed yet, and heedlessly ran him over with an avalanche of bad news, including but not limited to the unsettling tidbit that thousands of Nigerian citizens had taken to the streets to protest against the negligence of Steve's little protégé. Ross then poured a stack of legal documents into Tony’s cold, reluctantly open arms, along with the cordial request that Rogers et al please sign on the dotted line.

In hindsight, there’d been a great many things Tony should have done. He should have laughed like he’d so desperately wanted to, unbridled and free, reminded Ross that he’d lifted a country several feet into the air and blown it to pieces. He should have told Ross that he’d washed his hands of this Avengers business, remember, that Thor and Bruce had gone and taken with them any lunacy that had once accounted for Tony being on the team in the first place. Should’ve demanded, what makes you think I’m the one who can put Captain America on a leash, no pun intended? That I’d _want_ to?

But Tony had stayed mum, voiceless. He’d remembered that woman’s large, dark eyes, her quivering mouth. He’d remembered the weight of her hand on Tony’s chest, the photograph hot and searing like a brand even through the many layers of clothes, the maddening integrity of the skin underneath. He’d put on his best suit, he’d coiffed his eternally unaltered hair, he’d met Steve in the conference room at the Compound and smiled his warmest, most humane smile — _I’m here, I’m concerned, I’m physical dead but I still care, please, please hear me out._

Tony hadn’t been above pleading, and Steve had responded to it, responded to Tony like he’d always had — with compassion, with kindness. He’d offered up his palm, waited for Tony to lower his, settle it atop. Steve’s hand had been hot — hot like a stove, like a steaming tea kettle — and he’d closed it unflinchingly around Tony’s icy hand, held it gently, reassuringly. His eyes had searched Tony’s, and what he’d found there Tony still doesn’t know, but Steve’s gaze had softened, lowered, his eyelashes sweeping down, and he’d relented, “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but. There’d have to be safeguards.”

Tony had felt triumph, relief, contentment, gratitude — all at once, down to his toes, a dizzying rush. “Of course,” he’d breathed, and regarded Steve with frank, undisguised fondness.

How far they’d come, he’d thought, and marvelled at it — when they’d met, Steve and him had snarled and circled each other like predators would their prey, callous and bloodthirsty, making good on all clichéd myths that had been perpetuated about werewolves and vampires. That’s that, Tony had thought: if Barton fidgets warily whenever Tony’s in close proximity, if Tony’s cold touch — no matter how loving and warm he means it to be — makes Pepper’s skin crawl, then there’s no hope for Tony and the creature that history says is naturally predisposed to loathe and shun him.

Their unconventional bond may have put Tony in an early grave — damp, cold earth piling his eyelids closed, crusting underneath his fingernails, trickling unstoppably and surreptitiously like sand into his closed, dormant mouth — and yet still there’s a lesson that’s been learned here, less tears and blood to be spilled in seventy, eighty, a hundred years time.

Those damn mutts, when mated, _do_ bite the hand that feeds them.

* * *

When Tony had asked if he was allowed to borrow Rhodey’s eyes from time to time while Tony was laid to rest six feet under, Rhodey — because he’s a goddamn saint _and_ lunatic — said flippantly, “Sure, live vicariously through me.”

“What’s a little mind-share between friends, right?” Rhodey had gone on to ask, with the gargantuan aplomb and impassivity of someone who’d seen their friend go from pubescent, surpremely slutty college roommate to self-made superhero to emotionally bankrupt vampire within the span of three decades. “I feel like it’s a little late in the game to pretend like there’s any boundaries left in this relationship, anyway.”

As if to prove Rhodey’s point, Tony had cupped his hands around the sides of Rhodey’s face, hauled him in close. He’d been a little stunned and a lot mournful to see Rhodey’s heavy and swollen eyelids, the dark tear trail along the side of his nose. Tony had kissed Rhodey’s rigid, downturned mouth — close-lipped, hard, tasting salt. 

“If someone hurts you,” Tony had told Rhodey earnestly, “I will rise from the grave, pull out their living, pulsing heart through their chest with my bare hand, and eat it in front of them.”

“That’s sweet,” Rhodey had croaked, and bless the man’s loyal, honest, mammoth heart, for Rhodey had _meant_ it.

* * *

So now Tony rests. For how long at a time he doesn’t know — if someone were to ask, he’d say it’s a bit like laying down for a twenty minute nap and opening your eyes to pitch-black darkness, the unsettling silence of everything around you gone dormant, re-charging. Once Tony had let his consciousness soar and float into Rhodey’s, and he’d caught Rhodey’s reflection in the sleek chrome of the War Machine suit, seen the grey in the hair framing Rhodey’s skull and mouth — and the shock the sight had pulsed through Tony almost lifted him clean out of the earth, made him slam through Rhodey’s reinforced windows at the Compound and seize him by shoulders, demanding, _How long? How long was I asleep?_

Tony had been halfway towards awake when he’d realized — mortification making his eyelids twitch, the skin in the corners of his eyes crease — that there’d been no fresh lines in Rhodey’s face, no protruding, swollen veins on the insides of Rhodey’s arms, on the outside of Rhodey’s hands. His hands — closing around cups and doorhandles, juggling phones and waving off corrupt, self-serving orders — were smooth, steady. Tony’s body had breathed a sigh of pure, dizzying relief, then settled back into inactivity, into stupor: immediate and all at once, like a primitive computer whose plug had been pulled.

* * *

Shaken, Tony drops in on Rhodey more frequently. This time, Rhodey’s in the conference room at the Compound, shuffling a pile of documents like a weary magician does a deck of cards. He withdraws a sheet of paper from the bottom of the pile, presses it flat with his palm. His gaze veers towards the top left corner, and Tony sees through Rhodey’s eyes, type-written: May 14th, 2018.

Two years.

It makes sense: Tony’s still sore, aching, tension pooling in his eyesockets, along his hairline. Thinking of what had sent him scurrying into a pit in the earth and curling up inside the bowels of the chilled, damp soil — down amongst the seeds and the insects and all things living and thriving — still opens up a well of hurt, draws in his stiff limbs: coiling up tight like a stung, wounded snail retreating back inside in its shell. Waking up now would be the equivalent of startling awake after a ten minute nap — nauseous and squinting and wishing death on whatever had prematurely pulled him out of his rest.

It doesn’t make him wish any less, however: to stand when Rhodey stands, shoulder his way to the front, put his own stiff, cold-blooded body between Rhodey and whoever the hell is marching down the hall. Because it is a march, a soldier’s march. Voices spill into the conference room, low and muted, and crowding around the doorway, looking like something out of an edgy, low-budget war game, is Steve’s entourage — his pack, for that’s obvious to anyone with functioning eyes. Rhodey — and, by extension, Tony — looks them over one by one, takes in the bullet-ridden and DIY stitched-up combat suits, the outdated Stark tech coiled around Romanoff’s wrists and hip, fastened to Wilson’s back.

One of them, Tony notices instantly, is not like the other, but next to Steve’s beard and Romanoff’s bleached hair and non-existent eyebrows, Barnes doesn’t exactly stick out like a sore thumb. Rhodey’s gaze flicks over to Steve's mate only once and then away again, oblivious and disinterested, and that’s all it takes, one glimpse: Tony recognizes the handcraft and design of that arm, jutting out of the ripped sleeve of Barnes’ blue jacket — gleaming and dense and intricate, black and gold. Wakandan.

“Y’all look like shit,” Rhodey finally announces, pulling a smile out of Natasha and Tony both.

The former peels away from Steve's group, worming her way underneath Rhodey’s arm for an uncomplicated, companionable hug. Tony, cold and spiteful and wounded, withdraws. He comes back eventually — of course he does — lonely and starved and hopelessly drawn to the bustle and the warmth and the easy camaraderie, but when he does, the conference room is empty save for Rhodey and Steve — and, leaning propped up against the wall, between the door and the couch: Steve’s shield.

From Rhodey’s vantage point, Tony can only see the long, broad expense of Steve’s back, his slicked back, dirty blonde hair. Because Rhodey’s not a cad and therefore not Tony, his eyes remain constantly and politely above the waist.

“How mad is he?” Steve asks unprompted into the room, his voice low and rough from — and Tony can only wager — disuse.

Rhodey snorts. Then he says, blithely, “You’re one lucky bastard, Cap. You know that, right?”

Steve doesn’t answer, but Tony — for better or worse — knows Steve well enough to be able to read his silence for what it is, and Steve doesn’t seem to agree.

“If I were to guess?” Rhodey goes on, answering Steve’s question, “I’d say moderately angry. But Steve, word of caution?” And that makes Steve turn, the familiar sight of those troubled eyes and downturned brows flaring vivid and scalding across Tony’s face, stripping his skin raw.

“I wasn’t actually informed of everything that went down between you two," Rhodey says, a warning. "If we want this whole thing to work out — and I’m assuming strongly that we do — I think it’s best for all involved that it stay that way.”

Steve’s lashes and head both sweep down, a subtle approximation of a nod. “He didn’t tell you,” he says quietly, directing it towards his gloved, battle-worn hands. Tony remembers those hands pelting away at the armor, desperate and hard-knuckled and bruised. 

“He didn’t think it wise,” Rhodey confirms, and then abruptly turns his back to Steve, busying himself with the documents strewn out across the desk, the paperweight he’d been gifted by Pepper. Tony's heart sinks when he realizes that Rhodey’s eyes are stinging, sharp and out of nowhere. Fuck, this never gets any easier, does it? 

Steve lingers behind Rhodey, clearly working up towards something. He says, picking his words carefully, “When I see him —”

“You won’t,” Rhodey bites out, rough and forbidding. 

Possible or not, Tony hears Steve falter, his breath turning solid, lodging thick and cloying inside his throat. “I won’t,” Steve repeats, careful and hollow, on a knife-edge. 

“He’s gone, Steve,” Rhodey says, and the hell of it is, Rhodey means for it to be reassuring. He doesn’t mean to hurt or maim or disarm, to dole out petty retribution. Just the reverse: Tony can feel the amount of effort it’s taking Rhodey to pitch his voice even and steady, to extent this token of consolation and fair leadership to Steve even through his own grief — if only it weren’t so awfully, tragically, hilariously misplaced.

Tony can’t see Steve, but he knows blood. He knows its scent, the rotting, corroding stench of someone that’s been wounded, that’s been mauled and cracked open and drained of something vital, something warm and pulsing and vigorous. It prickles cold and thorny along the back of Tony’s neck, heaves him an inch closer towards the land of the living. He could let it happen; he could let Steve's prostrating, acute distress and ungovernable hurt carry him the rest of the way — only then there’s no telling whether Tony will help Steve along by stepping on his neck and bleeding the bastard dry, or by swaddling him like a babe in his arms, rocking and swaying him back towards some semblance of reason.

“Gone?” Steve croaks, hoarse and fractured, as if his throat’s been cleaved apart by something rusty and sharp. "Gone where?"

“To ground,” Rhodey says tersely, and Tony wishes he’d left instructions: _break it to him gently, he cares more than he lets on_. He wants to close his hand over Rhodey’s mouth, fold him into his arms, tell him to _stop, this is hurting you both._

Steve, irrational with impending grief and unwilling to process, too blindsided by the curveball he’s been thrown, demands, “For how long?”

“Hell, Steve, you should know better than I do,” Rhodey says sharply, composure snapping, and then he throws out his hand, resentful and agitated, saying, “Some of them sleep for decades, others for whole centuries. And Tony never got a good night’s sleep in his life, so God knows he’s got a lot of catching up to do.”

Rhodey seems to become aware of his lapse in composure then, because he closes his eyes and quietens. His hands clasp and unclasp where they’re folded around the edge of the desk.

“He was tired,” Rhodey concludes, as if that were all, as if it were truly that plain and simple, or maybe he just believes it’s all the information Steve is owed. Then he turns, and six feet under in the cold damp earth, Tony is mouthing useless but profuse apologies, one after the other falling off his lips unheard. 

He’d never meant for this to happen — never meant for Rhodey to turn around, the sight in front of him careening into him like an out-of-control car into an unsuspecting pedestrian, wide-eyed and wrong-footed by the unprecedented carnage he’d unwittingly caused. Never meant for Steve to have gone so completely and clearly to bits in front of who is essentially his superior, clumsy and sick and overwrought with misery, tears dripping hot and wet and unquellable down his face — onto his hands, into his parted mouth, soaking his beard.

“Steve,” Rhodey stutters, horrified and dismayed.

Steve brings up his hands, big and fumbling and _shaking_ , Jesus. He scrubs at his face — wet and flushed as if he’d dunked it in ice water — and then he murmurs, “Oh god,” wrecked and mortified, muffled underneath the press of his fingers. Eventually he throws his hands back out, defensive and shielding the dissolved ruin that’s become of his face: his reddened and unseeing eyes, his sniffling nose.

Steve says, “I gotta,” congested and tear-soaked, jerking his head towards the door.

“Yeah, of course,” Rhodey blurts, guilty and therefore obliging, urging him on.

Tony watches Steve’s bowed shoulders, his hasty, wounded departure — hears Rhodey mutter, “Damn, Tones, what the hell,” — and it’s a good thing the earth’s already swallowed him whole, because it just might be exactly what Tony deserves, after all's said and done. 

* * *

Rhodey, because he’s the man Tony's always aspired to be, eventually goes after Steve, finds him sitting against the walls of the Compound — curled up like a gut-shot victim that could only make it half a mile before he toppled down, exposed, on the cold hard ground.

Rhodey joins him there, bending and folding his artificial legs. “He grows on you, huh?” Rhodey says, deadpan and dry and yet still sad, still commiserating, and Steve’s shoulders twitch, his body coiling in tight, as if that small reminder of who Tony was at his heart is too much for him to bear.

Rhodey leans in close, murmurs his reassurances and condolences. He sits with Steve for what seems like hours, fills him in completely: how Tony had been tired and struggling for a long time, how — after Afghanistan — he’d always needed to be needed in order to keep going; how he didn’t feel like he was needed during and after everything had fallen apart due to the Accords; how Tony had heard of Wakanda, and then felt secure and confident that it was his time, his due, to rest, and to rest with ease.

It had been a long time coming, Rhodey confides in Steve, watching him shake and surrender, heartsick and defeated, to his grief — long after Tony thought Steve had already exhausted himself, that he'd already given over everything that was in him to give.

When half a day later Steve’s giant, shifted wolf form clambers onto Rhodey’s bed, a fistful of Tony’s clothes clutched in his sharp-teethed maw and Tony’s room a ransacked wreck, tear-soaked whines pouring out of his throat, Rhodey has to console and explain all over again.

* * *

Tony remembers the turning point in his and Steve’s relationship: it had been fairly early into the conception of the Avengers, when Tony had — by his own doing, no doubt — been the odd man out. He’d withdrawn deep into the guts of Stark Tower and only ever resurfaced at the promise of moonlight, of solitude. Upstairs, he’d sought out a small patch of natural light, angled his body so the weak flare would spill all over his hands. He’d closed his hands around a mug of scalding hot, wasted coffee, and wondered if this was his very own, customized purgatory. He’d died in Afghanistan, and now he had to live out the rest of his days in the makeup of the cold-blooded, heartless monster everyone had always — secretly and openly — thought him to be, roaming the earth side by side with people who’d once done a good impression of loving him and now shuddered to be near him.

Tony had been licking his wounds in private, had wholeheartedly and silently given himself over to dramatics — so it had just been as well that he’d then turned his head, noticed the darkness inside the doorway had become solid, alive; that it had morphed into four legs, a heaving chest, triangular ears.

Canines, Tony had come to find out, could sense that Tony had been turned into something less than or beyond human, and it frightened them, put them on the defense: they’d elongate their neck, bare their teeth and gums, shed all that innate sweetness like they did their fur. 

It hadn’t taken Tony at all long to figure out that the wolf in his doorway was Steve: he’d been big like Steve, fair and silent like Steve, strangely perceptive like Steve. Tony had closed his eyes and thunked his head back against the wall, all too aware of the not-so-vulnerable stretch of his own throat, the cold, scarred skin underneath his unbuttoned shirt. Steve had likely come back from the hunt, and Tony was spilling blood all over the common room floor. It had been only natural — for Steve to still be pulsing and warm with adrenaline, for him to follow his nose, tracking the scent of the wounded and weakened and non-resistent all the way to its source.

Tony had kept his eyes and ears closed to Steve’s bared teeth, to his inevitable growling and snarling. He’d expected the hard cold of Steve’s teeth against his throat any moment now, and he’d already forgiven him all of it — except then it had been a lifetime later, and none of it had happened. 

He’d felt the soft prickle of Steve’s fur across his hands first, and opened his eyes to Steve’s anxious, fretful gaze, his furrowed brows — even in his wolf form. Steve’s coat was cold and rough, drenched in the scents of the woods and outside, his paws dusted with dirt and wet. He’d scraped those paws against Tony’s chest, against his shirt, attentive and soothing, settled back on his haunches and licked at Tony’s hands, his jaw, his face — and Tony had let him, wide-eyed and stiff with wonder, warm for the first time in what had surely been months.

Steve had licked the blood tears from Tony’s face, all instinct and care, and finally Tony had been rocked into motion, settled his hands on either side of Steve’s giant, impulsive head; had held him in place with his own superhuman strength, told him no, never to taste that blood.

Steve — obliging and mellow, his tongue lolling — had folded down across Tony’s lap instead, breathing even and deep: a grounding, fever-hot weight that was keeping Tony alive for another night. 

* * *

“I knew you weren’t well, but not like this,” Tony hears, or maybe he doesn't. Probably he hears because Steve wants him to hear.

“If I’d known I was close to losing you, too," Steve says, scraped hollow, emptying his guts, “I’d have fought to keep you."

“I would have fought for you, Tony,” Steve swears, and Tony feels all that anger and resentment drain out of his skin, seeping into the cold damp soil below — a solid, nourishing meal for all the starved maggots to feed on.

He thinks, _Yeah, I know,_ weightless and drowsing, slowly gaining back his strength. _I know, Steve._


End file.
